The Apartment
by Evandar
Summary: AU When student Yagami Light moved into a new apartment, the last thing he expected was for it to be haunted. L and Light friendship, mentions of MelloNear
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Death Note_ and I am making no money from this story.

**AN:** It's been ages since I've written anything _Death Note_ related so I have absolutely no idea where this came from. I hope you enjoy it anyway.

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The Apartment

by Evandar

Part 1

"I'll be fine, Mum, really."

It didn't look as if his mother believed him, but she nodded anyway. She didn't leave, however, and continued to stand in the middle of his new living room, looking around the room as if she was trying to find something wrong with it.

"I still don't understand how you got this place so cheap, Light," she said.

Light winced. He had been hoping to avoid that question. Still, the apartment had been a bargain, and after his father had died he hadn't been able to afford to pass it up despite the…history. His mother wouldn't approve, though.

There was nothing wrong with the apartment itself. It was quite spacious for an inner city apartment and it was close to the university campus. The windows were quite large and the rooms were a good size, and it came with a private bathroom. It was everything Light could have wanted.

"I suppose that the owner just wanted someone to take it," he said.

His mother frowned. "That's the problem," she said. "Normally people would be dying to snap a place like this up. Especially at the price you got it for."

"It was something to do with the previous occupant," Light said. "I didn't ask."

That was a lie, but he didn't want to tell him mother that the previous occupant had died in the apartment, and that he'd only been found when people began to notice the smell. She would make him move back home if she found that out.

"Light…" she said warningly.

"It's nothing to worry about, mother," he told her firmly. "I need to unpack."

She nodded. "Alright," she said. "Just remember to call if you need anything."

He agreed and let her hug him. He kissed the top of her head fondly, and held the door open for her as she left. She paused in the doorway, and looked up at him. "I'm so proud of you, Light," she told him. "You're already doing so well for yourself."

He smiled. "Thank you, mother."

He closed the door behind her and leaned against it, turning to survey the chaos that was his new apartment. He'd labelled the boxes holding his possessions, but that didn't mean that they had been brought inside in any particular order.

His first week passed in a flurry of activity as he unpacked, shopped, and prepared to start university. He was going to be studying Psychology and Law, and the amount of materials he needed for the course was quite something.

He hadn't noticed anything abnormal about the apartment. Not really. He did get the impression that he was being watched sometimes, but he'd put that down to what the landlord had told him about the previous occupant.

Some kind of diabetic coma, apparently.

But other than the creepy feeling of being watched that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, he couldn't find anything wrong with the place.

He easily settled into a routine. He would get up, go to university, stop by the store on his way back home after his classes had finished, and spend his evenings studying. It was a lonely life, but despite what Light pretended with his classmates, he wasn't all that much of a people person. He preferred his own company to anyone else's; at least that way he could be guaranteed intelligent conversation.

About a month after he had moved in to his apartment, Light sat at his desk with his laptop and a pile of books in front of him. He was exhausted. He had been working on this same essay for hours, and no matter how many times he looked, he couldn't find the passage his teachers had mentioned in one of his books. That passage was necessary for a passing grade, but according to Light's text books, it didn't exist.

He wanted to scream. Instead, he stood up and padded barefoot into the kitchen to make some coffee. He was waiting for the kettle to boil when he noticed the reflection of the room in the dark window. His breath hitched and he spun round to look at the doorway, but saw nothing there. He shook his head and slumped back against the kitchen counter, glancing back at the window. For a moment, he'd thought he'd seen the reflection of someone standing in the doorway.

When his coffee was ready – instant, black with no sugar – he walked back to his room. He wanted to get as much of his essay done as he could, though that wouldn't be much if he couldn't find that passage.

He sat back down at his desk and placed his mug of coffee on the coaster next to his laptop, before cracking his knuckles. He looked back down at his books again, and almost burst out laughing. It had been right under his nose all along!

"I must be more tired than I thought," he murmured to the empty room.

There was no response – not that he had been expecting one – and he got to work, quoting the passage from a book lying open on his desk. He didn't notice that it wasn't one of the books he had been using earlier.

The day of the essay deadline came round, and Light felt unusually jaunty as he headed home from campus. He had bought himself some dark chocolate as a treat; he wasn't one for sweet things, but he did enjoy dark chocolate on occasion, and he supposed that successfully completing his first university essay by the deadline was reason enough.

His good mood faded slightly when he entered his apartment. It was freezing cold – cold enough to make his breath mist in the air – and all of the curtains were closed. He frowned at that; he could have sworn that he'd opened them before he'd left that morning.

Light placed his shopping bag on the kitchen counter and started to go around the apartment, opening all the curtains. He liked natural light; it saved on his electricity bill.

He went back to the kitchen and blinked at the sight that greeted him. The bag of shopping had been unpacked, but nothing had been put away. Had he done that?

"I could have sworn -" he murmured. He didn't finish his sentence. His chocolate was missing. He knew for a fact that he had bought chocolate, and put it in the carrier bag, but now it was gone.

"What the hell?"

He shook his head and got to work making his dinner. He really was letting those stories about his apartment get to him. But…he couldn't quite shake the feeling that he wasn't alone.

It was ridiculous, of course. He was alone. He ate his dinner alone, watched some television alone, and headed to bed alone. "There's no one else in this apartment," he told himself as he opened his bedroom door.

He wasn't expecting his laptop to be on. It was humming softly, and the screen showed an open Word document. Light blinked. "I thought I switched you off," he murmured. He had switched it off, he realised. He'd done so the previous night, but now his laptop was definitely on.

And next to it was his chocolate.

The bar had been opened and broken into little squares, which had been neatly stacked one on top of each other on the foil wrappings. Light looked around his room urgently, but there was no one there. It was just him with a laptop that was supposed to be off, and some chocolate that he hadn't opened.

He sank into the chair by his desk. He was shaking slightly. "Stop it," he told himself. "It's just some chocolate." He buried his face in his hands and focussed on his breathing.

The chocolate was still there when he looked up again. As was the running laptop. Light raised an eyebrow. There was something written on the Word document, text filling the page. He pulled his laptop closer and began to read. It was all one word, he noticed; a word that sent shivers down his spine.

_Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. Kira. _

"Someone has a one-track mind," Light murmured.

Kira. If anything could inspire true hatred in Light, then it was Kira. That…person had murdered his father, among millions of other people, and had gotten away with it. After the task force the NPA had set up to catch him had been destroyed – right down to the famed super-detective L – the police forces of the world had pretty much given up, allowing Kira free reign.

Light knew his father would have been disgusted with the state of the world as it was now. But when L had died, hope had died too.

Light slumped back in his chair, performing a mass delete on the text. He knew for a fact that he hadn't written it, and – running on the theory that ghosts might possibly exist – there was no reason for the previous occupant of his apartment to have written it either. He had died of some sort of sugar overdose, according to the landlord, not a heart attack.

He switched his laptop off and shut it. He snatched a piece of the chocolate up off the top of the stack – who on earth did that to their chocolate? – and shoved it in his mouth. It tasted as good as he thought it would, but it was surprisingly cold for something that hadn't been refrigerated.

"I'm going to bed," he announced.

There was no reply.

Light shrugged, and stood up. He moved automatically as he changed into his pyjamas and slipped under the sheets. He buried his face in his pillow and tried not to think about his father and Kira and the sight of his mother's face when she had heard the news.

Sleep didn't come easily to Light that night. He lay with his eyes closed, trying to relax, but couldn't. That feeling of being watched was back, and it was stronger than ever.

He cracked his eyes open and glanced around his room. He froze when his eyes landed on the doorway, and his heart leapt up into his throat. There was a dark figure standing in his doorway, looking right at him. He could make out the shape of ridiculously messy hair and two darker shadows where there should have been eyes. Light tried to look away, but couldn't. He couldn't move.

The figure moved, raising one of its hands to reach for him, and Light clenched his eyes shut. "You aren't real," he hissed.

He only opened his eyes when the feeling of being watched dissipated. The figure had vanished. Light didn't sleep at all that night.

He found it difficult to concentrate at university the next day. He was exhausted and twitchy thanks to all the coffee he'd drunk in an attempt to stay awake. He barely made it through the day, and broke his routine of going to the store in favour of going straight back home. Light was not an insomniac by any means, and he needed his sleep.

What he found when he got home, however, distracted him from his exhaustion. All of his curtains had been closed again, and his laptop was sitting on his coffee table, the Word programme running. Light could have sworn that he had left his laptop on his desk in his bedroom like he always did.

He sighed and bent over it to read the text in the Word document.

"_Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real."_

Light supposed he had a right to feel slightly incredulous. "Of course you'd say that," he snapped. "You're a figment of my imagination."

There was a response this time. The coffee mug that had been sitting on the table next to his laptop shattered against the far wall. Light got the impression that whoever – whatever – it was he was talking to did not like being told it wasn't there.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

No one replied.

By the end of the week, Light was barely able to stay awake, and yet completely unable to sleep. He didn't want to sleep: whenever he did, the apparition would come back. It would mess around with his things, his head – though not only when he was asleep – and it would watch him as he lay unconscious.

He was beginning to understand why no one had wanted the apartment. The previous resident was haunting it.

There was nothing for it: Light knew that if he ever wanted to get a good night's sleep ever again – without having to move back in with his mother and younger sister – he would have to figure out what the ghost wanted.

The first step to that, of course, was asking the landlord who had rented the flat out before him. The question did not do down well. Light watched the man's usually jovial expression transform into one of distaste in a matter of seconds and knew that he was going to have difficulties. He wondered if the man was remembering the body's discovery.

"He gave a false name," the landlord said. "I never found out for sure who he was."

"What was the name?" Light asked him.

"Ryuuga Hideki."

It was a pretty obvious alias, under the circumstances. Ryuuga Hideki was a famous pop idol and still very much alive. And who on earth rented an apartment under a false name? A criminal? That would explain the Word document with Kira typed all over it. Had he used a fake name to try and escape Kira?

Or maybe he hadn't been a criminal at all. There were such things as witness protection, after all. Or maybe he could have been one of Ryuuga Hideki's fanboys.

Or maybe, and Light felt slightly incredulous at the thought, he could have been L.

"Do you remember what he looked like?" he asked.

The landlord frowned at him. "Why do you want to know? He wasn't anything like that famous one to be sure."

Light smiled. "I'm just curious," he said, hoping that he sounded as innocent as he thought. The landlord was definitely suspicious.

The man sighed and ran his hand through his hair. "He was a scrawny guy," he said. "Pale too, and slouched. Wore cheap clothing and walked around barefoot. He looked ill all the time too, like he wasn't sleeping. He had huge bags under his eyes. Black eyes, I think, they might have been dark grey though, and his hair was black. Very messy."

Light sighed. Dark hair and eyes described the majority of Japan's population. "What did he do?" he asked. "You said before I moved in that his body had been…" he trailed off and the landlord grimaced at the memory. "Surely someone must have missed him?"

"No one I know of," the landlord said brusquely. "He was with an old man when he moved in – his grandfather, I think he said it was – but I couldn't track the man down when I found the body. He ended up having a state funeral. As for what he did…he was a student at Touoh University apparently, but don't ask me what he was a student of. The university didn't have any working contact details for him either, by the way."

He sighed and ran his hand through his hair again. "I don't know why you want to know all this. He was a creepy guy when he was alive and trust me, he was even creepier with all the maggots crawling over him."

Light winced. This 'Ryuuga Hideki' had been pretty unfortunate, even if he was mysterious and creepy. No one deserved to be found like that. No one. Not even a criminal.

"I was just curious," he said, smiling sweetly at his landlord once more. "Thank you for answering my questions."

The man grunted and rolled his eyes. "Sure," he said. "Just make sure that they're about your boiler or something next time, okay?"

Light laughed. "Okay."

As soon as he turned away his smile faded in order to be replaced with a calculating look. So his apartment was haunted by an ex-student at his own university? That would make tracking down his records a great deal easier, though Light knew that they were probably faked as well. If he'd gone through the trouble of using a fake name – albeit a fairly obvious one – then there was no way that he had used accurate information on a university application form unless he had been incredibly stupid.

Light wondered if there had been any reason behind using the alias of 'Ryuuga Hideki'. He knew that the first thing that sprung to his mind on hearing the name was the singer his sister had so many posters of up on her walls. He certainly wouldn't have pictured a scruffy student who had looked like a corpse when he was still alive. Could that have been something to do with it? He knew – everyone knew – that Kira could kill with just a name. Surely then, picking a false name that would make Kira think of someone else – an innocent that he wouldn't want to kill – was an intelligent move.

Light raised a hand and massaged his forehead as he walked back up to his apartment. Apparently the resident friendly ghost – Light hoped that it was feeling friendlier now that he had admitted that it existed – had been pretty smart.

He almost walked past his apartment in the end. Deep in thought and bordering on exhaustion, he had been too preoccupied to notice his door. He wouldn't have noticed at all if it hadn't been for his neighbour, an elderly woman, opening her door to tell him to turn his television down when he went back inside.

Light paled at her words. His television had definitely been switched off when he'd left to talk to his landlord. Evidently his undead roommate was up to something. Again.

"Sorry about that, Takeshi-san," he said, giving her an apologetic bow. "I put it on for background noise. I'll be sure to be more considerate in future."

She sniffed and shut her door in his face.

"Bitch," he muttered, and turned back to look at his door. It looked plain and boring and just like every other door in that hallway – apart from its little brass number – but in that moment it looked incredibly sinister. He swallowed nervously and pulled his keys out of his pocket.

The door unlocked easily, but when he swung it open he gasped. His breath misted in the air and he shivered violently. It had been like opening the door to a walk in freezer. He could hear his TV blaring and, mindful of risking his neighbour's wrath more than he already had, he darted inside. He hugged himself as he walked deeper into his apartment, rubbing his arms through his too-thin shirt. It was freezing cold and dark. Very dark.

The curtains he had opened wide that morning had been shut tightly, and the only light came from the flickering television.

He grabbed the remote off the coffee table and turned the volume down – it had been at top volume; no wonder he'd heard complaints – and took a moment to study the channel the ghost had chosen to play. It was Sakura TV.

Previously known for running tacky game shows, reality TV programmes and wildly inaccurate news reports, Sakura TV had made a name for itself recently as the first channel to ever show a video made by Kira and prided itself on being chosen as Kira's official television channel. Now it showed more accurate news reports in the aim of aiding its patron, showed documentaries on Kira – not that they knew much to make programmes like that on – and held religious services to Kira every hour or so, begging him to save them from corruption.

It was, in Light's opinion, still incredibly tacky. Personally, he thought that Kira could have chosen a much better station to claim as his own. Besides, the fact that Kira had his own cult didn't settle well with him; Kira had killed his father, after all, along with a lot of his father's co-workers.

It was one of those services now. He watched as a fat, moustachioed man dressed in a tent-like white robe trimmed in gold raised his arms above his head and screamed for Kira to bring damnation on the law-breakers.

"You have terrible taste in television," Light commented.

He hadn't expected an answer. The ghost had never answered him before, after all, but this time there came the sound of a dry chuckle from behind him. The hairs on the back of Light's neck stood on end and he pivoted slowly on the spot to look behind him.

Sitting on his couch, with his knees tucked up under his chin, was a pale, scruffy looking man with wild black hair and dark eyes rimmed with thick black bags. He was transparent.

Light nearly screamed, but managed to keep his mouth shut just in time. Instead he chose to stare wide-eyed at the figure – the ghost who had been making his life hell – and tried not to panic.

The ghost looked up at him, cocking his head to one side almost playfully, though there was nothing playful about his expression. He looked at Light calculatingly for a moment before returning his attention to the television.

"Yagami Light," he said, "aged twenty, born on February the twenty-eighth nineteen eighty-six. You are the only son and eldest child of Yagami Soichiro and Yagami Sachiko, and the elder brother to their daughter Sayu. You were the junior high school tennis champion in nineteen ninety-nine and two thousand, though you quit before you entered high school where you proceeded to get top grades in every subject."

Light gaped at him. The ghost merely blinked, glanced up at him again briefly before continuing to stare at the television. "I'm afraid that beyond that my information may be a little out of date."

Light felt like his knees were about to give out so he sat down before he fell down. He ended up perched on the sofa next to the ghost, trying as hard as he could to ignore the chill radiating off the spirit. "How?" he asked. "How do you know all of that?"

The ghost didn't look at him this time. "It is my business to check the backgrounds with everyone I work with along with those of their family."

"Who are you?" Light asked, forcing himself to keep his voice calm.

The ghost turned towards him, and Light noted that – rather disconcertingly – he could see the light from the television flickering over the cloth of the sofa through the ghost's body.

"I am L," the ghost said. He lifted a bony hand and bit down on the pad of his thumb, worrying it slightly between his teeth. Light absent-mindedly wondered if that was some sort of nervous habit. Could ghosts even have nervous habits?

The thought of a ghost being nervous around him, of all people, struck him as fairly ironic under the circumstances. After all, it was his apartment that was being haunted.

"Oh," he said. Then, "you worked with my father, then."

"Yagami-san is a good man," L said quietly, his words sounding slightly muffled by his thumb.

"Was," Light corrected. "Kira killed him too."

"I see."

Light jumped when, suddenly, the people on the television burst into song, praising Kira's name to the heavens; their outstretched arms raised above their heads and their expression rapturous. He glowered at the TV. Kira didn't deserve such a spectacle. If those people wanted to worship something then they should have gone into religion rather than making one out of a glorified serial killer.

L, judging by the faintly disgusted noise he made in the back of his throat, agreed with him.

"Do you…" Light said awkwardly. "Is there something you need before you move on?"

From the corner of his eye, he saw L's lips quirk. "I must catch Kira," he said calmly.

Light had figured that it would be something like that. What else would it have been? What else would the greatest detective in the world have wanted except the completion of the case he had been working on when he died?

Light closed his eyes briefly. "Would you like me to help?" he asked.

There was silence, and it was only the fact that the freezing temperature remained the same that told him that his ghostly companion hadn't left.

"Yes," L said eventually.

Light opened his eyes, looked the ghost right in the eyes, and nodded. And he wondered if he had just signed his death warrant.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** See the first chapter.

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The Apartment

by Evandar

Chapter Two

After he had agreed to help the ghost of L move on – possibly at the cost of his own life – L almost vanished from his life. Light supposed that the ghost was thanking him for his compliance by allowing him to get some sleep and finish the university coursework that was hanging over his head. Not that, in comparison to the thought of solving the Kira case, a two thousand word essay on bipolar disorder was all that intimidating. Still, Light appreciated the reprieve.

And when L did decide to return, he certainly made his presence known.

Light had been standing in front of the sink washing his face and wearing nothing except a towel, his hair still dripping wet from the shower, when he had looked up and spotted a pair of large black-rimmed eyes staring over his shoulder at his reflection out from under a messy black fringe. Light had shrieked – his voice echoing off the tiles – and spun round to face the ghost of L. All too late he felt the icy cold radiating out from the spirit's transparent form and shivered as that cold hit the water droplets on his bare skin.

He folded his arms over his chest in an attempt to both warm himself and hide his rapidly hardening nipples from the ghost who was looking entirely too interested in Light's body.

"A little warning next time!" Light scolded him.

L raised one hand to nibble at his thumb and slouched further. His other hand was buried in the pocket of his jeans – what he had been wearing when he'd died, Light presumed – and Light eyed it warily. "Go through to the living room," he said. "I'll be out in a minute."

L nodded, turned, and walked out through the wall. Light shivered. L was definitely a creepy bastard.

He dried and dressed himself in record time and headed to the living room to find that L had closed his curtains again before settling himself on the sofa with Light's laptop on the coffee table in front of him. He was sitting in that odd position with his knees tucked up to his chest again, and Light wondered if that was some sort of nervous habit as well. It looked incredibly uncomfortable. Even so, he didn't say anything about it.

"So," he said, breaking the uncomfortable silence and trying to get L to focus on something that wasn't the little 'v' of bare skin where he'd left his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. "Where do we start?"

"Your father led me to believe that you had helped with police investigations before, Light-kun," L commented.

Light nodded. "Yeah," he admitted, "but we aren't the police. You're dead and I'm a university student; hardly NPA material."

He left out the fact that, until Kira had won over the Government and the NPA, he had wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and become a police officer. Now that they had truly succumbed to Kira's corruption, though, he wanted nothing to do with them. He wanted nothing to do with Kira – other than to catch him and probably kill him, with any luck – and his twisted sense of justice and morality.

"That is very true," L admitted thoughtfully. "However the basics are still the same. We start by gathering as much information as we can."

Light nodded. "You had to have notes on him when you were running the investigation," he said.

"Of course," L said. "But they were deleted when Kira killed Watari." An expression of sadness flickered briefly over his face, and Light thought that grief made him seem so much more human. "A copy might have survived elsewhere, provided that Kira had no access to our servers and can't trace an IP address, but accessing it could be problematic. I have been dead for two years, the passwords might have changed."

"We'll start there anyway," he said. He sat down as close to L as he could bear – mindful of the temperature more than anything else – and pulled his laptop onto his knees. It was already switched on.

L leaned over his shoulder as he typed. He gave directions on how to hack into the server – Light did have some hacking experience, which seemed to amuse L for some reason, but without L he wouldn't have had a clue what he was meant to be hacking into. The files, thankfully, still existed, and Light felt a surge of relief when he hit the download button and began to copy them onto his computer. At least he wouldn't have to repeat the years of work that L had no doubt put into the case originally. He could just pick up where L had left off.

While the folders downloaded, Light went to the kitchen to get coffee. Sick of instant coffee failing to keep him properly awake during the worst of L's haunting, he had forked out for a proper coffee maker. Waiting for the machine to percolate, he allowed himself a moment to think things through properly. He wasn't usually an irrational person, and going after Kira was definitely an irrational thing for him to do. But at the same time, Kira had killed his father and he had killed L who now spent his time haunting Light's apartment. It was personal. Kira had killed two people close to Light – although admittedly, L had only become close to Light after he had died – and that was more than enough to make Light want revenge.

Kira hadn't just screwed up the world; he had screwed up Light's life and, selfish though it was, that was reason enough.

And, he supposed, at least he had help from the greatest detective in the world. Fair enough, L might have failed the first time, but now Kira had consigned himself to a ghost wanting to bring him down for the rest of his days. And surely Kira couldn't kill someone who was already dead, could he?

The machine finished, and Light poured himself a large cup of coffee. On a whim he added a couple of spoonfuls of sugar – far more than he normally would have put in – and he headed back to the living room. Being around L was making him crave sweet things. Odd. When he'd first moved in, hadn't his landlord said that the coroner had told him L had died of a diabetic coma? Possibly an inaccuracy, considering Kira's involvement, but it was still quite…spooky.

Light shook his head clear of those thoughts and sat back down next to the dead man. A glance at his laptop told him that the files were still downloading – he silently thanked god for external hard-drives – and a glance at L told him that something was bothering the ghost. L was chewing on his thumb again and looking at the laptop as though it was about to explode, which was slightly disconcerting since he had a better idea of what was on those files than Light did.

"They'll find you," L said eventually. "If they're still alive."

"Who?" Light asked.

L didn't reply. Light sighed and changed the subject. "So once we've got the files and read through them to catch up, what then? We keep gathering information?"

L nodded. "There will be two years worth of unevaluated data regarding the Kira case," he said. "We are very behind, Light-kun."

Light tactfully ignored the sudden familiarity. The ghost had seen him half naked before, not to mention that he'd watched him sleep. He supposed that by this point anyone would have thrown formality out of the window. Although he also suspected that anyone else would have gone to see a psychiatrist or an exorcist by this point.

"Right," he said. "But what about this 'they' you mentioned. Surely, if They had access to your files as well, They would have been able to continue your work."

It was, he thought privately, absolutely ridiculous. He could almost hear the capital letter tacked on in front of the word 'They' – the unknown entity that L seemed so sure would be able to find him. Then again, he also knew that L's very existence was bordering on the ridiculous all on its own.

"Yes," L murmured. "However, if my work was continued then it seems unlikely that they have succeeded, leading me to believe that they could be dead as well." He waved the hand he wasn't chewing on at his own transparent body.

Light swallowed. "More ghosts?" he asked. Then, "can ghosts track people through IP addresses and computer servers?"

"No," L said. "My experiments have shown that my presence is limited to this apartment – the place of my death – and wherever you are, though I cannot stray from you by more than ten feet without being transported back here."

"Transported how?" Light asked.

L gave an awkward shrugging motion that looked like he was trying to dislocate his own shoulder. "I do not know," he said. "Until recently, I did not believe in the existence of ghosts, spectres or anything else of a supernatural nature."

Light wondered if this had caused L to have some sort of identity crisis.

"However, shortly before my death, I realised that there was a twenty percent chance that I was wrong," L continued. "Either that or Kira was sixty seven percent more insane than I had previously given him credit for."

Light raised an eyebrow disbelievingly. It was a given, as far as he was concerned, that Kira was crazy. His god-complex was probably the least of his issues. Even so, Kira was definitely intelligent: he had to have been to have bested L.

"He experimented on prisoners," L said. "In order to test how far he was able to control them prior to their deaths. In one of those experiments, he had one of them leave a message. Hidden in that message was another message, which said that 'Gods of Death love apples'. At first, I was inclined to believe that the message was a game – a ploy to either worry me – or a sign of further psychological instability. Now, I'm not so sure."

He looked down at his transparent body, and the pattern of the material covering the sofa's cushions, which was visible through his bent knees. "After all," he continued, "if I can exist, surely a Shinigami is not so far-fetched."

There was a troubled frown on his face, and his thumb - if it had been real – was becoming in severe danger of being mauled. Light felt a surge of sympathy for L. It had probably been a right kick in the teeth to go through life so disbelieving of the supernatural, only to end up as a ghost.

His computer chose that moment to give a little beep, signalling that the file downloads had been completed. Light took a swig of his now cold coffee and pulled his laptop off the coffee table and onto his knees. He groaned at the sight of how many megabites of memory the files had taken up: he was in for a very long read.

"You're very thorough, aren't you," he commented as he opened the first file.

There was no reply. Looking round at where L had been sitting, he found his place empty. Light scowled. "Dammit L, give me some warning before you do that!"

He could have sworn that he heard a faint, ghostly chuckle.

But L's presence turned out to be completely unnecessary when it came to catching up on the work that he had done when he had been alive, which was something that Light felt more than grateful for, since L hadn't shown his face since their conversation while the files had been downloading. Even so, Light found himself missing the ghost. Even though the ghastly cold – a side effect of L's presence – was uncomfortable, L was a pleasant enough companion, and really, for such a popular boy, Light didn't have all that many friends.

The realisation that the one person in the world that he could ever see himself truly becoming friends with was the ghost haunting his apartment made Light want to bang his head of something hard. Instead, he concentrated on L's case files. It had the same headache inducing effect, after all.

He'd spent two week's worth of his winter holiday locked in his apartment and living off coffee, tea – when he ran out of coffee – and whatever meals he could scrape together using the contents of his fridge and cupboards. By the time the second Saturday of his self-imposed imprisonment came around, he was onto his third day straight of eating cup ramen. But, he had managed to finish reading the files.

Just.

With his brain aching from the sheer amount of information he had had to absorb, and his body shot to hell by whatever E-Numbers had been in the countless amounts of cup ramen he had consumed – he didn't think that he would ever be able to eat one for the rest of his life – he decided to go out. Grocery shopping, to be more exact, since the only things he had left were a packet of American cookies – called Oreos, or something daft like that – that had somehow managed to appear in his cupboard and a cup of 'Oriental' flavoured instant ramen – which he would rather die than even look at.

But after reading the files, even slipping on his shoes and jacket, and grabbing his keys and his wallet and heading down to the supermarket felt strange. It felt abnormal, somehow, as if the world had changed around him without him noticing; as if the sky had suddenly turned green and grass purple. Everything seemed to be in Technicolor, and everyone he passed seemed to stare at him suspiciously. He drifted aimlessly down the aisles when he arrived at the supermarket, and ended up staring at courgettes in complete incomprehension before a hand on his arm and the wrinkled face of an old lady peering concernedly up at him reminded him that no, courgettes did not hold the secrets to the universe.

"Are you alright, dear?" she asked.

He nodded. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips and he grimaced slightly at how odd they tasted – stale and suspiciously sweet. The result of far too much cup ramen, no doubt. "Yes," he said. His voice was raspy, barely more than a croak, and he realised that it was the first time he'd spoken in two weeks. "I'm fine, thank you. I'm just…out of it."

She nodded and gave his arm a sympathetic pat. "A hot meal and some sleep is what you need," she said. "You looked like death warmed over."

He said nothing about her over-familiarity. He just smiled, thanked her for her advice, and began to pile his basket full with fresh fruit and vegetables. He couldn't even look in the direction of the aisle where the cup ramen and other dried foods were kept. The meat and fish counters were also raided, and he found himself looking forward to eating something that had some sort of nutritional value.

He should have been expecting it.

The door to his apartment was closed and locked, just as he'd left it, when he arrived back. But there was something off. As soon as he entered, the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and for once it had absolutely nothing to do with L. His screaming instincts were proved correct when something cold, hard and metallic pressed non-too gently into the base of his skull. The door shut behind him with a click.

"Don't move," said a voice.

The accent was foreign, and probably European in origin, but Light couldn't place it exactly. The voice was deep enough to be male, but young, and Light subconsciously categorised the speaker as a teenager. The metallic thing, he knew, was the barrel of a gun. He swallowed nervously. A hand, strong-fingered and clad in a leather glove, snatched Light's door keys out of his grasp.

"Put the bags down," the voice said. "Slowly."

Light complied. Really, with a gun pressed against his nape, ready to blow his brains out, he wasn't about to argue. Inwardly he cursed L for haunting him, cursed Kira for killing L in the first place, and cursed himself for getting involved with this insanity as he knew that there was no way that anything like this would have happened if he had remained out of the Kira case.

It looked like the mysterious 'They' had found him after all. Goody. Light had always planned on dying while assuaging his own curiosity…

"Good," the voice said. "Now, walk forwards into your living room."

From the corner of his eye, Light saw a pair of leather boots decorated with more straps and buckles than he had ever seen on an item of clothing ever sitting innocently in next to the umbrella stand. Next to them was a pair of white trainers far too small to be Light's own. There were two of them. Wonderful.

But really, what sort of kidnappers/assailants conformed to the social niceties of the person they were threatening?

The teenaged kind, apparently, as when Light entered his sitting room, he was greeted by the sight of a small adolescent boy sitting on one of his chairs, twisting his fingers in his startlingly white hair. His skin was pale enough almost to blend into the white pyjamas he was wearing – the part of Light's brain that hadn't caught up with the fact that he was being held at gunpoint wondered what the hell the boy was doing wearing something like that in the middle of the day – and his eyes were an unnatural shade of green only seen on cats and coloured contact lenses. He was an albino, Light realised, Caucasian – fitting with his partner's European origins – and he was studying Light with the same sort of intensity that Light had seen on L.

He was, all things considered, possibly the most intimidating teenager Light had ever laid eyes on.

"Yagami Light," he said.

Not European, Light decided. There was a definite American twang to his Japanese, though it bordered closer to the kind of drawl usually found in the Southern States.

"I'm afraid you hold me at a disadvantage," Light said, "as I have no idea who you are."

The person behind him snorted. "Really? You managed to hack into our servers easily enough."

For a second, the intense, creepy stare of those unnaturally green eyes flickered to a place just over Light's right shoulder. Then it returned to Light, slamming into him with the force of the bullet train.

"You may call me N," the boy said after a moment.

Cute, Light thought. He almost said it out loud. L. N. The only one missing was M, and Light was willing to bet on that being the guy with the gun. Instead he took a deep breath.

"You're here about the Kira files," he said.

N continued to stare at him for a moment, before he nodded slightly. "Only one person had access to that server with those passwords" – shit, why hadn't L warned him that the passwords were personal? – "and he is dead."

"Right," Light said. "About that…"

"You are not Kira," N said. "You don't fit the profile, and as psychotic as Kira is, I do not believe that he would have been capable of killing his own father."

Light wondered briefly how much of the case files N had actually read himself. It had come as something of a shock to Light to discover that, in the early stages of the case, he had been a suspect and had been placed under surveillance. Obviously L hadn't found anything too incriminating as he hadn't been dragged in for questioning, but the knowledge that there had been a five percent change that he was Kira had stunned him.

It was a good thing that L had been making himself scarce, as Light was fairly sure that he would have tried to hit him at that point.

But, apparently, either N hadn't read that part or he was ignoring it for now. That was good. Light was under no illusions about how quickly he'd be dead if he said the wrong thing.

"So how did you, a student whose connection to L was tenuous at best, gain access to his passwords?"

And there was the fifty billion Yen question.

"I moved into his old apartment," Light said.

Apparently N hadn't been expecting that. He blinked, and his gaze flickered once more to the person standing behind Light. In response, the barrel of the gun pressed harder against the base of Light's skull. He winced.

"This isn't the time for jokes, _moj drug_," the one with the gun had no idea what that last part had meant, or even what language it had been in – definitely not French or German – but it sounded intimidating. That, he supposed, had been the idea.

"This is going to sound crazy," he said, "and it's a long story. Can I at least sit down?" It felt ridiculous to ask that; he was in his own living room, with his own sofa and chairs, after all. "And can you tell this guy to stop stabbing me with a gun please? You already know that I'm not Kira."

N hesitated, then nodded. The pressure on the back of Light's neck lessened, and then vanished completely, and he felt himself relax. He took a shakey breath, then determinedly crossed the room to the sofa and sat down. Sitting didn't stop his legs from shaking, nor did it lessen his desire to run screaming, but it felt…better to be sitting in the same spot that he'd spent the past two weeks. His laptop still lay on the coffee table directly in front of him, next to his tea cup.

He looked up at N again, and saw that the guy with the gun had joined him. They were as different as night and day. The one with the gun – and he was still holding it, tapping the barrel gently against his thigh – sat on the arm of the chair N was sitting in. He was dressed entirely in black leather, with a Catholic rosary – silver with beads made from some kind of red wood – hanging around his neck. There was a second rosary, one in the form of a silver bracelet fastened around his right wrist, the tiny crucifix standing out against the black leather of his glove. He had shoulder length, golden blond hair and the strangest colour eyes Light had ever seen. They were amber, but unlike N's eyes, they appeared to be natural.

"Speak," he commanded, and Light glared at him.

"Right," he said. "L. Well, like I said…"

And so, he began to tell them how he had met L, and of how L had helped him hack into their server to access the case files, all the while painfully aware of the growing looks of incredulity on their faces.

At least if I die, he thought, I won't be alone in here. The thought gave him a sudden and macabre urge to laugh. He resisted; he really didn't think that it would be appreciated.

"You think this is funny?" the blond asked. He looked – and sounded – pissed off, and the look N was giving him wasn't exactly inspiring the warm and fuzzies either.

"Not really," Light said.

The electricity chose that exact moment to cut out.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: **See the first chapter.

**AN:** This is the final chapter of _The Apartment_. Thank you for staying with me through my first multi-chapter _Death Note_ fic and for all of your wonderful reviews. I hope you enjoy this, and the epilogue which is at the bottom.

* * *

The Apartment

by Evandar

Chapter Three

Light closed his eyes in anticipation. The blond boy had sprung into action as soon as the lights had cut off, and there was an ominous click as his handgun was cocked. Light felt his hands start to shake. He was going to die. He was going to die because a ghost had set a couple of psychotic teenagers on his tail and because the fuse box needed fixing…

The temperature plummeted, announcing the arrival of Light's ghost in shining ectoplasm.

"What the fuck?" the one with the gun said.

Rather sadistically, Light found himself pleased that someone else agreed that his life was screwed up. He opened his eyes again, and was treated to both of the little psychopaths gaping at the sofa. Even the pale one, who had previously looked about as unflappable as it was possible to be while remaining human.

"Hey L," Light said.

He glanced sideways. Hunched over next to him on the sofa, transparent knees tucked up to his transparent chest, was the ghostly form of L. He smiled in greeting around the thumb he was brutally mauling between his teeth.

"Uh…" gun boy said.

"It appears Yagami-kun was telling the truth," N said quietly.

"Did you have to screw with the lighting?" Light asked. "I could have been killed." He waved a hand at the still gaping blond. "And my landlord's probably going to kill me if you've damaged the fuse box."

"Light is unnecessarily worried," L said calmly. "Hello again Mello, Near."

Apparently the psychos had names that weren't restricted to a single letter.

"Sv'ataya mat' Meri Boga…"

"L," N – Light was going to go out on a limb and say that this one was Near – breathed. "H-how?"

L made that odd arm-dislocating shrug again and bit harder at the thumb in his mouth. "Kira found me," he said tonelessly. "I woke up here."

Light had a horrible feeling that L had actually had to watch his own corpse decompose. He shuddered and looked away, not wanting to imagine what it must have been like.

"You're dead," he heard the blond one – Mello – say.

"Duh," Light muttered under his breath.

There was an awkward silence, where Light felt like his skin was going to crawl off from the hatred in the blond's stare. How had he managed to forget which one of the maniacs was toting a gun, exactly? Light was more than happy to blame sleep-depravation and overdoses of instant ramen.

Huh, his grocery shopping was still lying on the hallway floor.

"So what now?" Mello asked.

"We continue our search for Kira," L said. "Your cooperation will increase our chances of success by eighty – no, ninety two percent."

Light suppressed the urge to ask what their percentage of possible success had been before the terrible twosome had broken in. Instead he tried to act like this was the most normal experience of his life; like he often entertained psychopaths and ghosts in his apartment in attempts to solve murder mysteries.

"Your suspicions of Yagami Light's involvement in the case have been assuaged," Near stated. "Therefore it would be wasteful of his intelligence for us to proceed without the case without including him in our investigation."

He said it all in a perfect monotone. Light stared at him. He'd never met someone who sounded so much like a robot before. He wasn't the only one staring at Near in disbelief, though. Mello rounded on him, an expression of absolute shock and frustration on his face.

"Include this jackass?" he demanded. "Are you crazy?"

Light raised an eyebrow. "I'm a jackass?" he asked. "I'm not the one breaking and entering, psycho."

L sighed and muttered something that sounded distinctly like "children". Then, "Mello, Near and Light will be working together," he said, louder. "If Mello and Near require my input, that is, as my haunting locale is restricted to Light's own location."

There was another silence, where Near and L stared unblinkingly at Mello, who squirmed uncomfortably under the double weight of their gaze. Light rolled his eyes.

"Right," he said. "Well, while you're making your minds up, would anyone like some lunch?"

Later, Light regretted ever leaving them alone. In the space of time it took for him to put his shopping away, grill some mackerel, throw together a simple stir fry – actual vegetables! – and boil some rice, the three 'geniuses' in his living room had decided that it would be for the best if Mello and Near moved into his apartment – along with their friend, Matt, who'd opted out of trespassing – so that they could all work closer together.

Upon hearing of this decision, Light could have killed them. Mello, at least, seemed to recognise his eye twitching for what it was. Near and L either didn't notice or didn't care. Light suspected it was the latter, and was only prevented from committing homicide-by-chopsticks by the fact that L was already dead, and Mello looked like he was about to beat him to it anyway.

The looks he was sending his partner would have sent anyone who wasn't a robot running screaming in the opposite direction.

L just looked on at them all with an impish grin on his face.

After that, Light's degree was shoved very firmly to the side. The first few times he took a step back from the case to study or go to class earned him disparaging looks from Near, who was – apparently – still trying to get Mello to see his worth. Mello just looked unbearably smug all the time.

So in the end, Light called the Dean's office and claimed grief as a reason to stop going in to university.

"It was Kira, sir," he said, twisting the cord of the phone absent-mindedly round his finger. "He killed one of my friends. I didn't even realise he was a criminal. His mother's in pieces, and I – I have to help her. She has no one else. Yes sir, Kira killed my father too. He was a police officer involved in the investigation. I'm sorry sir, but it's the right thing to do. I'll make the work up next semester."

"You are a fantastic bullshitter," Mello said when he hung up. Light glared at him.

And with that, it was done. He had officially sold his soul to the Kira investigation and all the trappings that came with it. Trappings that included an agoraphobic albino, a trigger-happy asshole, and a lazy sonovabitch who not only spent twenty out of twenty four hours a day playing computer games, but who also happened to be the one who tracked Light down in the first place.

It was a good thing, Light thought, that he'd already got used to having a ghost around or else he might have gone insane.

Not that L was around all the time. He faded in and out of reality just as he'd always done, but every time he left, Light found himself starting to get antsy. He was still firmly entrenched in the belief that Mello would kill him without a moment's hesitation, and L's presence was like a very cold security blanket. L was the barrier keeping Mello from snapping and revealing more sociopathic tendencies.

It had come close when Light had accidentally walked in on him and Near doing things to each other in his spare room that made most yaoi manga look tame. Light had only just managed to close the door before a knife embedded itself in the wood at a height that – he discovered later – was exactly level with his eyes.

He hadn't been able to look at either of them for days. Matt, the useless one, thought it was hilarious. Light wanted to hurt him. So did Mello. Apparently the only time they would ever agree was when it came to people who they thought should die – apart from when that person was Light. Light didn't want to die; Mello would be quite happy to rip him apart with his bare hands.

It was the middle of May when they caught a lead. Amane Misa – fashion model, actress and L's main suspect for Second Kira – announced her engagement to the whole world. Her fiancé was one Mikami Teru, a lawyer. Exact details of their meeting were hazy, and Mikami fit the profile.

High sense of justice – check.

Obsessive compulsive disorder – check.

Moral superiority – check.

Known association with Second Kira (their possible acquaintance being in the high seventies percent-wise) – check.

Light could have cried with relief. If this Mikami guy was Kira, then they had as good as caught the bastard. Then it meant that L and his father could be avenged and he could have his life back. With the end in sight, he worked tirelessly, comparing data files and charts and researching Mikami Teru's background so thoroughly that he was pretty sure that – had anyone wanted to know – he could have told them the exact shade of Mikami's piss on any given day of the week.

The investigation ran smoothly. Then, predictably, the shit hit the fan.

Near, for some unknown reason, had decided to confront Mikami in a waterfront warehouse. At the same time, Matt – with the aid of some NPA officers who had all owed Light's father favours – blindfolded Amane Misa and took her into custody, leaving justice to be carried out on Mikami by L, Light, Near and Mello.

Near had passed around the Death Note he'd got Mello to steal from Mikami's gym locker – a thought that had made Light laugh hysterically; what sort of idiot carried such a weapon around with himself all the time, risking its exposure with every second, only to leave it in a poorly padlocked gym locker for two hours every morning?

Shinigami, as it turned out, were seriously ugly. The one that hung around Mikami alos kept glancing at L and laughing hysterically. Light seemed to be the only one paying any attention to it. L was focussed on Mikami; Near was revealing his brilliant cheat-riddled plan; Mikami was growing more and more psychotic by the second; Mello was used to laughing idiots, having apparently hung out with Matt for the majority of his adolescent life.

Mikami's face had turned a bizarre shade of purple by the time Near had fully explained the minutiae of his brilliant plan. The complex circles, lines, tangents and random squiggles of his thought process had all been laid out for all to see, and he looked smug about it. L, on the other hand, had pointed out to Light several times during the investigation what he would have done had he been alive.

L's version had been far more straight-forward, however, since that approach had led to L's untimely death, Light didn't have much faith in it. Besides, he too was more of a circular logic person.

Mikami burst out laughing. "You caught up with me, yes, but Kira will live on! Kira is God!"

"He's a raving lunatic," Mello said. He cocked his gun expressively in preparation to put a bullet between Mikami's eyes – something he'd been itching to do for days.

But Mikami ignored the threat and looked straight at Light. "You weren't careful enough," he said, and pulled a piece of lined paper out of the pocket of his neatly pressed trousers. "Ryuk! Give me the Shinigami Eyes!"

Like all crazy villains with delusions of grandeur, Mikami had focussed on the wrong person. Mello raised his gun and squeezed the trigger. There was an explosion, Mikami's head snapped back and a fine red mist blew outwards like a halo. As if in slow motion, Mikami's knees gave out and he dropped. For a moment, the corpse swayed on its knees, before toppling forwards and landing with a crunch on the concrete floor. Light privately thought it was almost offensive to L that Kira had turned out to be such a moron.

Mello blew the smoke from the barrel of his gun, flicked on the safety, and tucked it firmly back into his obscenely leather pants. In the front. Light, having seen far more of Mello's anatomy than he'd wanted, wondered how on earth he found room for it in there.

The Shinigami fell over, it was laughing so hard. It hovered horizontally in the air.

L walked over to the corpse and peered down at the man who had killed him. He crouched down, folding his knees up to his chest and inserting his thumb into his mouth. He looked…just as transparent as always. Light had thought that the end of Kira would let L move on. L had thought that. Was L going to be stuck in his apartment for the rest of his death?

Oddly, Light didn't mind the idea too much. He liked L, he realised. He was – improbably – his best friend. He was intelligent and made for good conversation and chess games, once they got past the initial problem of L not being able to touch things very easily. Having L haunt him a bit longer would be…nice.

Just as long as they got rid of the three other _living_ people that were cluttering up his apartment.

L tilted his head at an improbable angle for a moment, and then looked up at Light. There was a tiny, transparent wrinkle between his eyebrows. He looked thoroughly miserable, and his teeth were chewing more vigorously on his thumb than ever.

"Please come here for a moment, Light-kun," he said.

Light approached him. He was aware of Mello and Near watching them curiously, but he and the Shinigami's laughter, but he ignored them. All he could focus on was L's silvery presence.

"What is it?" he asked.

In reply, L pointed down at the piece of paper that Mikami had pulled out of his pocket. When he'd first revealed it, Light hadn't been able to get a good look at it, but from this distance there was no mistaking the neat kanji.

_Yagami Light, 5:33 pm, 31 May 2009, Heart Attack_

Light swallowed and glanced at his watch. The digits 5:32:55 stared back up at him. He looked at L. They had been sloppy. They hadn't covered his tracks. Kira had caught him and Light was going to die.

"Shit," he said.

Something in his chest constricted. Light gasped for air, his eyes watered, and the last thing he saw before the world went black was L's eyes growing wide with horror.

End

*

Epilogue

Light slumped onto his sofa with an exaggerated pout on his lips. L looked across to him from where he had been watching Matt play Resident Evil on his Playstation with a kind of morbid fascination.

"They're having sex on my bed again," Light explained. He hadn't meant to intrude – again – but Near's laptop had beeped with a message for the new L and L had been too lazy to poke his head through the door and tell Near himself.

Or, perhaps, he'd realised what was going on.

L chuckled at his psychological pain as Matt whooped something about "owning Pyramid Head" or something like that.

"If it bothers you so much we could always haunt them into leaving," he suggested. "But then Light-kun would have to deal with new tenants having sex in his bedroom."

Light grimaced. "They can stay for now," he said. "They keep things interesting at least." And Mello's death glares were far less intimidating now that he was actually dead and could escape them by vanishing from human sight. "I'll just have to tell them to hang a sock on the door or something."

L grinned, stood, and held his spidery hand out. "Then let's throw socks at them until they get the hint," he said. "Mello is amusing when he's frustrated."

Light grinned back, and took L's hand with his own.

L no longer felt cold.


End file.
